


Simply Not That Simple

by Zaxal



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Fix-It, Fuck Canon This Is My House Now, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 05:18:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18514696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaxal/pseuds/Zaxal
Summary: Quentin steps through the door to the afterlife and finds himself.





	Simply Not That Simple

Quentin steps through the door, eyes momentarily blinded by the bright light on the other side.

He considers, for a moment, how weird it is that his eyes _hurt_ in this, the afterlife, when his body isn’t physical.

He wonders how much longer he will think of himself as Quentin. He doesn’t know what happens after this, if his soul reincarnates, if he goes on to another life. Level Two, and what it might bring. He wonders if his father is waiting for him, if Arielle and Teddy are there, or if they’ve already long-since moved on to whatever comes next.

Quentin blinks the light out of his eyes and finds himself standing in a forest glade. It looks like it could be anywhere in Fillory but nowhere that he’s been; it evokes nostalgia and the strange wonder of being somewhere new simultaneously.

He hears a soft chuckle and turns to look to see…

The Quentin standing on the other side of the door looks like he came from the Mosaic timeline. His hair is streaked with white, pulled back away from his face. He’s wearing clothes Quentin recognizes: a hoodie, a t-shirt, jeans. It’s jarring to see on him, like seeing the potential future he could have had. If Quentin hadn’t seen his face in mirrors, in the waters’ reflections, and if he didn’t know how very much he looked like his father, he might have failed to recognize himself.

“You look lost,” the other Quentin says, eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiles.

“I… I kind of am?” he admits. “I don’t know where I am.”

“Well, you’re not in Fillory anymore, Toto.”

His stomach clenches, a memory nagging at the back of his head. Will those go, too? Will he forget everything, in time? Eliot’s high-pitched giggles, his playful sing-song, _“We are going to Fillory!”_

Quentin shakes his head. “I figured. Uh. If the afterlife was just Fillory, I’d be… Kinda let down.”

“ _Just_ Fillory.” The older Quentin clicks his tongue. “You’ve been dead for, what, a couple of days, and you’ve already forgotten what Fillory was?”

“A disappointment,” Quentin says matter-of-factly. “A— A bunch of half truths, where the lies were told by a child molester.”

“Ahh,” he says. “You’re thinking about the books.”

“The place wasn’t so great, either.”

“No? The Drowned Garden, the Secret Sea, Whitespire—?”

“I mean, if they ever wanted to make that theme park, it’d probably be a nice visit.”

The older him doesn’t seem to mind his deflections. He asks softly, “The Mosaic?” He expects his heart to pang and flinches from it instinctively before remembering that his heart stopped beating. “You saw the beauty of all life, didn’t you? You lived it.”

Arielle and Eliot singing, one working on the garden and the other on the Mosaic. Teddy running into Quentin’s arms, at first scooped up easily but slowly turning into a man with his eyes and his mother’s smile. Arielle’s funeral and the gray days that followed where, sometimes, he only felt anchored by Eliot’s hand reaching for his. He feels his eyes start to get wet — and how bullshit is it that he can _cry_ after dying — and his breathing hitches before he wipes the tears away with a sleeve.

“I’m, I’m ready for something new,” he says, full of confidence.

“You are.” The other Quentin smiles. “You always are. You walk through some trees to a magical University, and you ace an entrance exam. You find yourself in the land of your fantasies, and you take to it as if you mapped every feature yourself. You find out that you died, and you’re ready to move on immediately.” There’s a sadness in his expression.

Quentin feels, suddenly, a little trapped. “Why are you here?”

“I’m here, because I realized something. We realized something, but you haven’t gotten there, yet.”

“So you’re me, but from… a different timeline? From the Mosaic?”

“I’m you from here, where time means nothing until you want it to.”

“So, so I have to age into you?”

“No, this is a glamour, I guess you could say.”

“Am I gonna have to have this conversation with another version of me— _us_ before I can move on?”

“No, I don’t think so. This is less of a time loop, more of a mirror-type situation.”

“So, you’ve realized something, but I haven’t? What is it?”

“That would be telling.” The other Quentin smiles again at his outraged huff.

“I— I had this conversation, okay? It wasn’t suicide. I can move on.”

“You could move on, even if it was. Penny’s job was to help you come to terms with it all. But not everything he led you to was the absolute truth.”

“This is stupid,” Quentin says, running a hand back through his hair. “I’m— I’m _dead_ , and I still have this stupid voice telling me that I want to…”

He trails off, the thought catching him off guard. His fingers knot in his hair, the imagined pain nothing compared to the real thing.

“Truth is a funny thing,” the other Quentin presses on. “Two contradicting statements can exist, and they can both be true. One, I died to save my friends. Two, I saw a way out.”

“I didn’t want to die!”

Unphased, the mirror continues, “One, I didn’t want to die. Two, I’ve never stopped wanting to die.”

Quentin’s breathing is coming faster even though he shouldn’t be able to have a panic attack.

“One,” he steps closer, a soft hand on Quentin’s face, pulling his face towards him, “Fillory is the worst disappointment of my life, and two: Fillory was the greatest adventure I could have ever had.”

“So, so what is this? Our thesis statement for _In Defense Of Fillory_?”

“One,” the mirror says patiently, softer, “I’m always ready for something new. Two, I am always running away.”

Quentin feels as though the air has been sucked out of his lungs, eyes searching the strange but familiar face in front of him. The other version continues, “What is this, if not another secret door? One that we can’t go back from?”

“Th- then what’s the point?” Quentin’s voice trembles. “What’s the point of knowing if it’s too late to make a choice?”

“Who said it was too late to choose?”

“I’m dead.”

The mirror Quentin smirks. “When has that stopped anyone?” He looks over Quentin’s shoulder and nods until Quentin turns his head. There’s a perfectly ordinary door with no frame, standing in the middle of the woods. “We always have a choice,” he murmurs in Quentin’s ear. “And if we choose to walk away, it will now be with the knowledge that we could have come back.”

“And…” Quentin swallows thickly. “And if I go through that door?”

“It’s not a new adventure. Not yet, not _really_. But it will be. Give it a few weeks. The world will always have something new for you to explore and old things to cherish.”

Quentin turns his head, but the other version of himself is gone.

He knows he is meant to walk through the forest, to find what lies on the garden path.

He brings his hands up, gathering magic into his palms before he shoves the battle magic forward, blowing the door off its hinges.

In the station, the lights come back on.

Penny smiles, leaning on the wall at the edge of the room.

Quentin steps out of the green forest and into the gray Underworld and asks: “What happens, now?”

“Do you really want to know, or do you want to find out for yourself?”

Quentin doesn’t even think before he nods, but before Penny can start speaking, he shakes his head. “No. I— Let me see how it plays out. So long as it does.”

“No promises,” Penny says as if offering him the same choice as before, to let him move on.

“That’s— I mean, that’s life, right?” Quentin squares his shoulders, ready to fight his way out if he has to. “That’s life, and, and if there’s even the smallest chance that I can go back to being alive, that’s what I choose. I choose to live.”

Penny’s smile widens and tilts his head towards the door away from Quentin’s. “Come on. I’ll sneak you back into the Library.”

The first step away from the door to the afterlife is the hardest, but soon, Quentin is jogging to catch up with Penny, and as they leave the station, the lights go out, and the door to the forest disappears.


End file.
